Chapter 9. Exchanging Messages with SOAP

There are times when less is really more. When asking about SOAP, programmers and programming managers often say things like, “Isn’t SOAP just an alternative to DCOM or CORBA?” The correct answer to that question is, “No, it is much less than that.”

Different application development platforms have various distributed computing mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms are very efficient, but limited in what operating systems and languages they support. In addition to those efficient technologies, all operating systems have a less-efficient way of exchanging data via files full of characters. At the most basic level, SOAP messages are just streams of characters. They are not just randomly created characters, ...

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